It has already been proposed in the prior art to treat beet cossettes or other vegetable matter, such as chicory, potatoes, carrots, fruits with pulsed electric fields in order to extract substances there from.
Specifically, by subjecting a vegetable tissue to pulses of an electric field, the cellular membranes of the tissue are rendered permeable or destroyed so that the cellular juice can be recovered. Such a technique is generally known by the term “electroporation”.
In this regard, reference may be made to the document WO 2009/129991, which describes such a method for the electroporation of beet cossettes with a pulsed electric field.
In the method described in said document, the beets are first ground into cossettes, and a liquid phase is added to the cossettes. The mixture obtained is subsequently conveyed without pressure into a reaction chamber in which a pulsed electric field is sustained.
This method requires the use of a conductive liquid mixed with the cossettes in order, on the one hand, to facilitate their delivery to the treatment chamber and, on the other hand, to overcome the drawbacks associated with the relative inhomogeneity of the mixture of cossettes in the treatment chamber, creating nonconductive voids between the cossettes.
The presence of this liquid phase requires the use of a pulsed electric field generator having a high capacity, of the order of 60 kV, and consequently a treatment chamber having relatively large dimensions.
It is therefore an object of the invention to overcome this drawback and to provide a method for treating vegetable tissues which makes it possible to extract a juice from the tissues without requiring the use of a liquid phase.